Category: Art

Finding Flow and Sharing Weight – dance workshop Sat. May 30th

Social partner dancing, including ballroom dance, has become really popular lately. It is fun to just get out on the dance floor and dance. But there are two things that I dont like about traditional partner dance styles. The male/female roles are annoyingly strict and stereotypical, and you have to memorize a whole bunch of steps in order to actually connect with your partner in motion.

Ill be teaching a free class at Artomatic this coming weekend introducing a partner dance form called Contact Improvisation. Aside from being a fun way to dance, studying Contact Improvisation can help you learn how to move with grace and pleasure in your own body. For this class Ill be teaching a set of exercises on weight sharing, and another set of exercises on flow. This is an introductory class appropriate for all levels.

Contact can get pretty acrobatic, and extreme. Here’s a video showing two of the founders of Contact Improvisation – Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith.

The acrobatic stuff they’re doing – the ‘flying’ – is enabled by a real awareness of how you share weight. You can share weight with other human in many different ways. If you are facing someone like youre about to shake hands, and you both put your hands out in front of your shoulders, you can lean in and support each other like playing cards making a house of cards. You could also then clasp hands and lean out from each other, sharing weight to make the letter V (coming from your feet toward your heads.) There are many ways to share weight, and to develop sensitivity to shifts of weight. Ill be introducing just a few exercises in weight sharing. Because weight sharing exercises can lead to balance points, and lack of motion, Ill be teaching a few exercises on finding flow. With these two sets of exercises under our belt well spend the remainder of class having practice dances with each other.

I’ve been dancing Contact Improvisation for fifteen years, and have enjoyed studying with a number of visionary teachers in the field. I love Contact Improvisation, and Im really looking forward to introducing some of the skills and ideas of Contact Improvisation in this class Saturday May 30th from 2-3:30pm. I hope that youll be able to join me; please feel free to share with your friends.

The is a one-off, free workshop Im doing to help promote the shows Im having in the Fringe Festival this summer. Check out https://www.dayeight.org for more information on that.

-Rob

Artists Should Know About Fair Use Copyright Law

copyright2This was originally published as “Fair Use Copyright Law for Artists” – Published on Bourgeon, May 22, 2009. I think artists need to know that Fair Use copyright law exists, cause it’s important to understand what copyright gives you control over, and what it doesn’t give you control over.

As you know if you read this blog regularly, I don’t usually write for Bourgeon. Bourgeon is a communal publishing point; a place for artists to share their words about their work. Every now and then though, I do man up and write articles that I think are relevant to the community. Bourgeon’s readership is the art-interested public, and artists themselves. If you’re reading this and you’d like to be published in Bourgeon, please don’t hesitate to contact me; I’m always interested to hear/learn more about what folks are up to.

———

Creators today may assert copyright ownership of their creations, but this does not necessarily limit the publics legal access to or usage of their work. Fair Use copyright law is intended to protect usage of a copyrighted work for criticism, comment, new reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. In application and implication, Fair Use law has significant impact on creators, scholars, and journalists.

Fair Use law is different from some other areas of the law in that legality of an action depends on several factors. Harvard Law School Professor and copyright expert Charles Nesson wrote, “Fairness is a standard, not a rule.No simple definition of fair use can be fashioned, no bright line test exists.” The U.S. Copyright Office outlines four factors in determining whether or not usage of a copyrighted work is fair (legal):

“The purpose and character of the use.the nature of the copyrighted work.the amount and substantiality of the portion used. and, the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”

In order to clarify some of the inherent fuzziness in the law, practice communities (such as book publishers, movie producers, and the music industry) are empowered to create Statements of Fair Use. These Statements document common allowable usages, and outline (but do not define) the ways in which a member of the public may use copyrighted material without reasonable threat of legal repercussion.

On Friday May 8th, 2009, the Dance Heritage Coalition presented the results of their multi-year project to develop a new Statement of Fair Use for Dance-related Materials. The mission of the Dance Heritage Coalition is to improve the ability of the dance community to retain and utilize materials documenting the art form. According to Project Director Libby Smigel, through developing and publicizing the new Fair Use Statement, the Dance Heritage Coalition hopes to encourage increased access to and usage of Dance-related materials. Smigel asserted that one reason archival materials remain out of sight to the public and researchers is confusion over copyright, and fear of lawsuits. The press release for the event noted, “it hasnt been clear how librarians, archivists, and curators can legally use. images and texts.” The issues addressed in the new Dance-related Materials Statement are common to other art forms. Fair Use access issues apply to images, videos, notes, copies, and recordings of any type.

In an explanation of Fair Use issues on their website, the Copyright Alliance (a trade association dedicated to tracking copyright issues) explains, “An individual does not have the right to make use of anothers copyright work. [Fair Use may apply] when someone already has a copy of a copyrighted work and makes copies, distributes, performs, alters, or displays that work and the copyright owner subsequently challenges that use of the work as being an infringement. In that case, the person could raise a defense of fair use.” Fair Use law is not intended as a defense for people who are simply too lazy to seek copyright permission.

nixon-leaving-white-houseThe impact on the financial value of a copyrighted material is a central issue in settlement of Fair Use-defended law suits. Writing on his website, journalist Brad Templeton reported, “Famously, copying just 300 words from Gerald Fords 200,000 word memoir for a magazine article was ruled as not fair use, in spite of it being very newsworthy, because it was the most important 300 words – why he pardoned Nixon.” Artists would be well-served to empower their own usage and the usage of others by considering how fair use law applies to their work.

The best way to be certain of the legality of ones usage of a copyrighted material is to seek copyright permission. In the event that copyright permission is not secured, Statements of Fair Use articulated by practice communities provide guidelines for usage, and defense in case of prosecution. To receive a copy of the new Fair Use Statement in Dance-Related Materials produced by the Dance Heritage Coalition, or to learn more about the document, visit www.danceheritage.org.

About All Good Men

I’ve written a number of posts about creating my new evening lenght show. This post sort of condenses lots of the writing from those earlier posts, and adds a little more context.

From 2002-2004 I had a company  called the Blackbird Dance Ensemble. I made two evening length shows in consecutive summers, and with the support of grants I was able to perform in DC, New York City, Boston, and at the American Dance Festival. People responded positively to the work, but I didnt. I didnt grow up dancing, and I realized that I needed to become a better dancer to become the choreographer I know I can be. You can only focus on so many things at once.

Ive worked very hard on my dancing over the last five years, and it has paid off. Ive had the opportunity to dance for a bunch of local companies (Jane Franklin, Alexandria Ballet, Maida Withers, etc) and even got to perform and teach in Russia – a dancers Mecca. I decided last year it was time to start choreographing again. But I didnt get any of the grants I applied for, and so wasnt able to do a show. I didnt get any grants this year either, but I realized I simply had to get the party started. I know what Ive got, and have no doubt that one makes it easier to be overlooked when youre not out there making things. In December of 2008 I finalized my plan, and began working on the project that will premiere in the Fringe Festival under the title, All Good Men.

My work for the project began with the development of a script to use as the root for the evening. I picked up a Dylan Thomas film-script in a used bookstore in the fall of 2008, and was really grabbed by it. I decided to do a dance / theater adaptation. For little while I tried to rope in a theater director to help with the adaptation, and to co-direct. That being un-successful, I settled down to doing it on my own.

You might know Dylan Thomas as the poet famous for such lines as: “Do not go gentle into that good night”, and “Wow, I finished the bottle of scotch already?!?” (Thomas was a professional writer who died from an alcoholism-related illness at age 39.) His most famous script is the radio play Under Milkwood. Im producing an adaptation of  The Doctor and the Devils. After reading everything I could by Dylan (LOC, yeah you know me) I started typing up the script. The task was to take a 150+ scene film-script and translate it into something that could work on a stage, with dance.

The Doctor and the Devils is centrally concerned with the interaction between a medical professor/doctor and a group of people who dug up bodies to sell to the doctor for use in dissection in the academy. All of the characters are very complex, and the language is brilliant. I needed to simplify the plot, cut characters, and cut scene locations to make it viable on a stage. (Its now down to 20 scenes, seven characters.) Part of the process was figuring out where the dances would occur, and why. For me the core of the script is about our interaction on slippery moral slopes; how we all jostle and push each other up and down moral slopes. Dance is a very in-efficient replacement for language, but for handling the ineffable, its far more efficient than words. The dances expand and personalize the issues raised by the text in a way that simple theater couldnt.

Last month we started rehearsing the dances. Im really pleased with how its going. Ive told the cast that I think the fascia that holds the whole piece together is within the dances. While we did a read-through at the first rehearsal, since then weve only been dancing. Ill put up some rehearsal photos and perhaps some video in a future post, and perhaps talk more about what were doing with some of the specific dances, but Ive gone on long enough for now.